Lena and Olivier search the ruins of the Stone Tower after Maja’s disappearance and find a key, a voice overhead, and a door that should not be opening.
Wind moved through the grass around the old tower, bending it in waves against the black silhouette of stone and iron. Lena stopped at the rusted gate and tightened her grip on the torch. The place looked abandoned in the moonlight, but not empty. It had the kind of silence that seemed to listen back.
"Someone said they saw Maja near the ruins after dark," Olivier murmured at her shoulder.
Lena glanced at him. "A month after she disappeared, people are still saying things?"
"People say plenty when they’re scared."
He said it lightly, but his eyes kept moving over the tower walls, the broken windows, the weeds choked up through the courtyard stones. Olivier had been pushing for this all evening. He always acted as if fear was just another locked door waiting to be opened.
Lena looked at the dark archway ahead. Maja’s face had become one of those missing-person posters that people passed too quickly in hallways and on street corners, as if not looking too long might keep the world orderly. But the rumours had a shape now. A time. A place.
And this was it.
They slipped through the gate and into the overgrown yard. The torchbeam cut across cracked masonry and long-faded carvings in the walls, letters worn so shallow they looked half-swallowed by the stone. The air smelled of wet earth, rust, and something older that Lena couldn’t name. The tower rose above them in a crooked column, taller than she remembered, with its upper floors lost in shadow.
For one sharp second, Lena saw movement near the entrance.
A figure. Or the suggestion of one.
She stopped so fast Olivier nearly ran into her.
"Did you see that?"
"See what?"
She stared at the doorway. Nothing moved.
"Never mind," she said, though her skin had gone tight. "It was probably nothing."
They crossed the courtyard carefully, stepping around broken stone and patches of slick moss. Near the base of the stairs, something caught the torchlight and flashed back at her. Lena crouched and reached down.
A key.
Old, rusted, heavier than it should have been. She turned it in her palm. The teeth were worn, but not enough to hide the fact that it had once opened something important.
"Do you think it belongs here?" Olivier asked.
Before Lena could answer, a faint sound drifted down from above.
A footstep.
Both of them froze.
Then another sound followed. Metal scraping softly against stone. Not random. Not the wind.
Olivier took one step back. "Tell me you heard that."
Lena did hear it. And something else, too: a low, muffled laugh from somewhere inside the tower, as if someone had been holding it in for a long time.
Her gaze climbed the narrow staircase curling up along the wall. Dust clung to the railings. Shadows moved where there shouldn’t have been any.
Then a shape appeared behind the banister.
A person, half-hidden in the dark.
Lena’s breath caught. "Maja?"
The figure did not answer. It only lifted a hand, and in the torchlight something metal gleamed between its fingers.
Another key.
A heavy thud rolled through the tower above them. Then a second, deeper one, like a gate slamming shut on an upper floor. The sound vibrated through the stone beneath Lena’s shoes.
Olivier reached for her hand and held on.
"Now we’re in this," he whispered.
From the darkness overhead came a whisper so soft Lena almost thought she had imagined it.
Then the door at the top of the stairs began to open.